Art. Food. Kitty.

October 31, 2012

Halloween Picasso

After the success of last year's Halloween post, I felt the need to do something even crazier. As I was sifting through ideas on the internet last week, I came across a lot of Roy Lichtenstein-inspired makeup jobs. Those looked like they would be a lot of fun and easy for me to pull off, but Jeff urged me to try something nobody had seen before. If I remember correctly, I think he tossed out the name Picasso, and suddenly I was all about it.

A quick "Halloween Picasso" image search yielded a few results, but nobody had tried to recreate one of his portraits that incorporate multiple views (frontal, profile) of the same face. I found one that I thought Jeff and I could pull off: his Head of a Woman from 1960.

This is a portrait of his wife Jacqueline. She's not my favorite Picasso muse--that would be Francoise Gilot, no question--but her prominent dark eyes were similar to ours, and the rest of the painting looked simple enough.

I measured our faces and painted Jacqueline's hair, body, and background on a piece of foamcore. Then I cut out the area where our faces would go. Easy part: done.

This afternoon was the moment of truth: could we pull this off? I painted half of my face using this face paint. It required two coats, but I wish the white could have been even whiter. To really make it look like the Picasso, I needed to alter our eyes a great deal. Our eyebrows became the top lines of lashes, and I painted the irises on our closed eyelids. Finally I added eyebrows to our foreheads. It was so freaky! Jeff was a good sport during this process--he had just shaved and said the face paint was a little itchy.

While I was painting myself, Jeff set up lights in our living room and secured his camera at eye level to a ladder. We practiced putting our faces together inside the cut-out, and then we did a few trial runs filming this. It was harder to do than you might think, and the lighting never seemed bright enough. This was our best take (not sure why it looped it twice; sorry, I'm not a YouTube pro like some people):

We wanted to reverse the video so it played backwards but couldn't figure out how to do that. Plus we were getting hungry.

So once again (if you haven't seen Bun's costume, you should), Happy Halloween everybody!